A healthy lifestyle plays a key role in avoiding future disability, researchers say today.
The researchers, led by Dr Alexis Elbaz of the University of Versailles, France, and colleagues define disability as a "difficulty or dependency in carrying out activities essential to independent living, and quality of life."
They believe that identifying potentially modifiable risk factors could help in creating strategies to prevent disability among the older population. Some behaviours – lack of exercise, poor diet, smoking and excess drinking – have clearly been linked to worse outcomes including obesity, diabetes, cancer, brain impairment, stroke, heart problems and early death.
The team examined the combined effect of these behaviours. They took information from 3,982 men and women aged 65 years or over, living in France in 1999 to 2001. During the next 12 years, 31% of the participants developed a moderate or severe disability, they report in the BMJ.
Low or intermediate exercise was linked to a 72% greater chance of disability. The rise in risk for eating fruit and vegetables less than once a day was 24%, and current smoking or recent ex-smoking raised the chance by 26%. No clear link was found with alcohol.
The risk of disability "increased progressively with the number of unhealthy behaviours," say the researchers. Those with three unhealthy behaviours had two and a half times the risk of disability compared with those with none.
To check that disability followed the unhealthy behaviour, rather than the other way around, the team excluded those who had become disabled in the first four years. But the links remained strong, indicating that the unhealthy behaviour came first.
Artaud, F. et al. Unhealthy behaviours and disability in older adults: Three-City Dijon cohort study. BMJ 24 July 2013 doi: 10.1136/bmj.f4240 [abstract]
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